Eideard

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Low turnout in South Korea’s first vote on a social policy on Wednesday left in place a program in Seoul providing free lunches for 810,000 elementary and middle school students, a victory for the liberal opposition, which had urged a boycott.

Though the voting, like the lunch program, was confined to Seoul, the capital, it took on national proportions with all political parties joining the debate in a sign that, after decades of bickering over civil liberties, the economy and North Korea, they were now entering the unfamiliar field of social welfare.

Mayor Oh Se-hoon, urging more restraint in welfare spending, had asked voters to limit free lunches to only lower-income children, at an estimated savings of $100 million a year. His conservative ally, President Lee Myung-bak, supported him by joining in his denouncement of “populist welfare.” The liberal opposition urged supporters of universal free lunches not to vote, so the result would not be valid.

When the polls closed, only 25.7 percent of the city’s 9.4 million eligible voters had voted, lower than the 33.3 percent minimum for a valid result, leaving in place the broad lunch program set up in January by the opposition-dominated City Council. By law, the votes of an invalidated referendum are not counted.

“I humbly accept the voting result,” Mr. Oh said. Earlier he had vowed to resign if the proposal he backed lost.

The opposition called on Mr. Oh to immediately step down. “Because of one politician’s selfish decision,” said Lee Yong-seop, spokesman for the opposition Democratic Party, “our society had to suffer a terrible ideological conflict and social unrest.”

RTFA for the ins and outs of the discussion, of the considerations forced on voters because of beancounter politicians who wanted to save money by exaggerating class differences.

Sound familiar?

In the UK, that is:

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The £4.5bn national identity card scheme is to be scrapped within 100 days, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced today.

The 15,000 identity cards already issued are to be cancelled without any refund of the £30 fee to holders within a month of the legislation reaching the statute book.

Abolishing the cards and associated register will be the first piece of legislation introduced to parliament by the new government. May said the identity documents bill will invalidate all existing cards.

The role of the identity commissioner, created in an effort to prevent data blunders and leaks, will be abolished.

The government said the move will save £86m over four years and avoid £800m in costs over the next 10 years that would have been raised by increased charges. An allied decision to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports will save a further £134m over four years. Savings to the public under the whole package will total £1bn…

A separate scheme under which identity cards are issued to all foreign nationals resident in Britain by 2015 run by the United Kingdom Border Agency is still to go ahead. Home Office ministers said yesterday this was a separate scheme for biometric residence permits for foreign nationals that was required by European Union legislation…

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said: “The wasteful, bureaucratic and intrusive ID card system represents everything that has been wrong with government in recent years.”

My personal politics – like many, especially those I hope who take the time to learn rather than listen – are a mixture of progressive goals, fiscal conservatism, a touch of libertarian individual protectivism and a thoroughgoing distrust of professional politicians.

But, then our nation’s history is a wee bit different from those on the other side of the pond.

A Swedish couple in search of the isle of Capri drove to Carpi, an industrial town in northern Italy, because they misspelt the name in their car’s GPS.

Italian officials say the couple asked at Carpi’s tourist office where they could find Capri’s famous Blue Grotto.

The car’s sat nav system had sent them 650km off course to Carpi.

“Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat,” said a bemused tourism official in Carpi.

Once they realised their mistake, the couple got back in their car and headed south, the official added.

Maybe GPS should come with spell check?

The BBC has been forced to apologise to an acclaimed psychologist and writer after editing her derogatory comments about religion so that a radio programme broadcast “the opposite” of what she had said.

Dorothy Rowe complained to the corporation that her interview on the Radio 2 programme What Do You Believe? had been so heavily edited that the final version misrepresented her views. During a 50-minute recorded interview, Rowe, best known for her work on depression, had attempted to comment on the subject proposed by the programme’s producer: “Why so many people want to believe in God and search for faith.” But she was aghast to hear how her words were eventually used.

In an email to the corporation, published on her website, Rowe stated: “My words were edited to make it sound that I held a favourable opinion of religion in that it gave a structure to a person’s life. What was not broadcast was what I had said about how such structures can be damaging to people. Being misquoted in this way concerned me greatly.”

Rowe…said on her website she had no option but to complain as she was acutely aware of the dangers of “having something in the public domain that did not represent my views” and which would “could cause me considerable problems, particularly when the subject matter was religion”. She said the interview “sounds like I am giving unqualified praise to religious belief. There is no mention of what I talked… about at length, that religious belief can cause immense misery. I often summarise this with: ‘The church keeps me in business’.”

What Blair hath wrought…